A New Identity For Old Cities

The Digital Economy Is Changing The Function Of Downtown

December 3, 2000|By Joel Kotkin, The New Geography

In a manner not seen since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, technology is reshaping the landscape of American communities.

Just as the railroad, telegraph and mass-production factory transformed the social and economic reality of cities, towns and rural hamlets in the 19th century, the rise of the digital economy is repealing the economic and social geography of contemporary America.

The digital revolution not only accelerates the speed with which information is processed and disseminated, it also restates the relation of space and time within our communities.

By its very nature the emerging postindustrial economy -- based primarily on information flows in an increasingly seamless Internet -- frees location of the tyranny of past associations. Even such centers as Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley are increasingly not mandatory for the building of a successful firm or career. Increasingly, companies and people now locate not where they must be but where they will.

Increasingly, those decisions have led to even greater growth in suburban and exurban communities located far from the center cities that historically have dominated metropolitan areas both in terms of population and economic activity. Given this emerging reality, urban downtowns have found themselves taking on a new identity.

The recovery in these cities does not suggest that downtowns are, as breathless news-media reports have it, "marching again to grandeur" or enjoying "a stunning revival" back to the glory days of the mid-20th century. Rather than recovering their place as geographic centers of the entire economy, city centers are readjusting themselves to a more modest but sustainable role based on the same economic and cultural niches that have been performed by core cites from the beginnings of civilization.

Today the hope for central business districts -- from Houston and Los Angeles to Baltimore and Boston -- lies not in clinging to the Industrial Age paradigm of high-rises or massive factories. Instead their futures lie in rediscovering their pre-industrial role as centers for the arts, entertainment, face-to-face trading and the creation of specialized arts and goods and services.

Ioanna Morfessis, president of the Greater Baltimore Alliance, said, "People can't expect the city to be the financial and corporate center anymore. It will be where people go for health care, good restaurants and entertainment."

This notion represents a quiet revolution in perspective. Traditional boosters of downtowns based their strategy on maintaining the manufacturing, corporate, bureaucratic and support bases that adhered to the center city for most of the pastcentury. When these functions began to disintegrate in many cities, some political leaders and academics in the late 1980s and early 1990s wrote off downtowns as destined to serve solely as "the preserve of the homeless, the so-called underclass and the persistently poor."

Yet in the digital era, it is the pre-20th century the essential, classic characteristics of cities that have bequeathed a future for the center. In losing much of its 20th-century economic role, the center city now offers precisely what it always did: a different experience from that of the countryside or small town.

Writing of another city, Berlin, at the dawn of the past century, the sociologist Georg Simmel hit on something of the essential appeal of the dense urban district:

"With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life."

Seizing on this "contrast" stands at the heart of center-city development strategies, not only in older-establishment downtowns such as those of Baltimore or New York, but also in more dispersed cities such as Denver, San Diego, Oklahoma City and Wichita.

Critical to the evolution of cities has been the demographic growth of populations -- gays, "empty nesters," divorced and never-married people -- traditionally attracted to the inner cores, because of the availability of a social experience uniquely to be found there. As a whole, this childless population's numbers have doubled in the past quarter century. Single buyers of homes have been among the fastest-growing segments in residential real estate nationally. In San Francisco, they account for a strong majority of buyers.

Andrew Segal, a 31-year-old budding real-estate mogul who has purchased and retrofitted class B office space in such cities as Houston, Dallas, Baltimore, Tulsa and Hartford, observes, "Sex is what sells the city. It's where the single people are, where you go to a bar to meet them. That's what makes it work. In Houston there are few places for people to walk around and promenade -- downtown is the exception."